May 14, 2011

Everyone's telling me to get out of Blogger. Here's the counter-argument, blogged last Monday — before the epic outage. This is hard to take:

I can expect my blog to be up 100% of the time. They simply don't go down! It was actually quite a relief today, with such a high traffic day (see my blog post about it), to not have to worry about any of my servers in the process. You simply don't need to worry about a burst in traffic, DoS attacks, or anything like that. Google handles all that for you and they're pros at it.

He's talking about going down because you get too much traffic. I've never had to deal with that issue. The idea of traffic as a bad, damaging thing... I've never blogged in that sort of environment. I've had the issue of getting waves of traffic from a very negative link, where I'm suddenly dealing with readers who are Althouse-haters. That's a problem in the comments, or if I click through to the link and see what sort of awful thing that's been said. Like on that blog that I don't link to anymore, where someone is trashing me for using the letter "M" to mean a thousand.

If you use "k" for 1000, it will never be misunderstood, but that only solves half the problem.

The problem with Google is it's too large. We can fix that. Use another search engine, blog hosting, and other things. There is no competitor for Google docs, but Yahoo mail is superior to Gmail in my opinion.

Spreading the wealth and power we have as consumers makes us all better off. The old problem of monopolies continues today but entirely by choice, laziness, low standards we demand, and herd mentality.

Rome is gone. Stop using Roman numerals and Latin. We have new stuff now. Get up to speed. If you use Latin where an English word is available, you are less interested in what you are writing than trying to impress people that you are educated. If your education does not allow you to make your point clearly in a modern language, then maybe you should downplay the fact that you spent time and money getting so smart.

There's two kinds of web traffic spikes. There's the avalanche of legitimate traffic (e.g. an Insta-lance) coming to your web site, and then there's the dreaded Denial of Service (DoS) attack which is where some malefactor deliberately sends a deluge of (usually deformed) requests to your site with the intention of shutting it down by overwhelming it.

The avalanche problems generally resolve themselves, but DoS attacks are simply a bear to defend against, and big companies like Google/Blogger are better able to provide that defense.

That being said, I don't think that even on Prof. Althouse's most controversial days, she truly pisses off the kind of folks likely to launch DoS attacks (e.g. hackers like ForChan, hostile foreign governments, black hats trying to greenmail porn sites, etc). Althouse mostly pisses off the cultural left, and they're not really into DoS as of yet, so I think she safe to move wherever she wants to go.

Assuming the problem really was a technical glitch, it could have happened on any web hosting platform, free or paid for. Joe Posnanski used to blog at his own domain, joeponanski.com, but it crashed last year and now he's got a new blog on...blogger.

No matter which way you go, backing up your stuff is the only way to make sure it doesn't disappear into the ether. As much of a pain in the ass as that is.

The developer totally confuses the functions of running and maintaining the infrastructure competently with running the blog and he's been fortunate so far. I believe he's enamored with free while what he's really seeking is widely available for reasonable money.

It's still common to use "M" for 1000 in American commerce on price lists and invoices. Engineering, metric, no.

"If you use "k" for 1000, it will never be misunderstood, but that only solves half the problem."

I was taught long about to use M to mean a thousand, which it does. It's also used to mean a million, which creates confusion. I agree that it's better to use K now, but it's just dumb to go off on someone who uses M for a thousand. I mean there's a lot of ambiguity in language. Deal with it. If you're my editor, I'll agree with you about making the change to avoid confusion, but if it's already out there, you a jackass to get rude about it.

There is no such thing as 100%...5 "9's" is the top benchmark...however it may be ungracious nitpicking to point that out.

Every server will go down, the difference is how quickly the host brings your service back up. Blogger is easy and there is something to be said for that, but the length of your outage and that they won't/can't point to a backup/alternative site is, IMO, unacceptable.

Your domain DNS points to netnation in Vancouver, perhaps they have short turnaround DNS re-pointing service.

btw-I've used a 3rd party DNS service for years and can re-point in 15 minutes or less depending where my entry is in the server sweep. So you might think about that as a alternative. No-ip dot com is user friendly, reliable and cheap.

There is no such thing as, "it never goes down". A programmer should be the first to understand that.

Granted, there are all sorts of failovers that can be put in place and some systems are legendary for stability, but backups, etc. are done for the reason that the system could go down and all the redundancies can fail.

In the metric world (SI units), k denotes 1000. In the world of English units, m denotes 1000, and mm denotes one million. Current air emission permits normally list boiler heat input limits in "mmBtu/hour."

No, it's just informed. In the modern world, M = million. Gotta get used to it. Don't be defensive about it; learn the new letters. K, M, G, T.

RE: not wanting to worry about bandwidth-- that issue went away years ago for people with real servers. Don't judge your potential by own-serving bloggers who run web servers out of their nephews' basements. Serious web hosting can handle overages. You might pay more, but it's totally feasible.

I admit to being a bit embarrassed for A.A. when I noted her use of "M". But, guessing at her readership levels, I interpreted it as meaning thousands. I figured it was due to the lack of adequate geeks in most quarters of the law profession.

On further reflection, I thought about all those contracts that lawyers write with sub-sub-sub-paragraphs (i) ,(ii), (iii) and the like.

But, of course, I realized! She probably is just thinking in Latin and the Roman Numeral M just came out naturally.

I wonder, though, what she thought the first time someone said "IM me!"

Maybe a halfway measure is a good move. That is have a non-blogspot domain that you own and points to www.althouse.blogspot.com. Clearly leaving www.althouse.blogspot.com will lose you a ton of traffic if you do it today but having a shadow domain will take a little leverage away from google (especially if you try to encourage people over to the new domain). Even if the level of perceived leverage that google has won't change their behaviour (it clearly won't) it can at least give you some peace of mind.

There are other companies that can provide you with the ability to handle large traffic similarly to google, also with very little headaches.

I had problems with your blog for several days before it went down completely. I got error messages or one or other piece of sofware missing messages from time to time, but all the problems were temporary. earlier I also had problems with Google mail. Not the best advert for their cloud platform launch.

K (kilo) is used for thousand, as in measurments. However, I can't imagine some dolt holding you to your mistake, as you are clearly not a person with scientific/eng'g background.

Don't underestimate the potential disruption of an Instalaunch. I had one over the Christmas break while on travel, and my blog, hosted on a pentium server in my basement, just melted down, and I couldn't fix it until I got home.